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strengthened, not weakened, by its empirical falsifications.
Christianity did not disappear when Jesus failed to return as the
early Church expected; neither was Marxism done in by the
invalidation of Marx's empirical predictions. History-and the
history of religious hopes-is not ruled by logic.
What does become necessary in the wake of eschatological
disappointments is some kind of revision on the intellectual level.
Vilfredo Pareto had a good name for this mental operation–
"logicalization. " The regrettable delay in Jesus' Second Coming
(scholars of Christian origins use the wondrous term
Parousieverzoegerung
to denote this) had, somehow, to be explained . Nearly two millenia
of Christian history provide support for the hypothesis that, by and
large, the explanations have been plausible. The failure of the
revolutionary Parousia to occur has also had to be "logicalized," and
much of the intellectual history of Marxism in this century is a
record of this necessity. The
idee-cle]
in this undertaking to correct the
shortcomings of history has been that of the "external proletariat"
(the phrase stems from Rosa Luxemburg); its most influential
elaboration has been the Leninist theory of imperialism. While this
theory (which continues to be refined and amplified to this day by a
host of busy Marxist logicians) is far too complex to be discussed
here in its details, the underlying cognitive operation is as simple as
it is ingenious: since the revolutionary class cannot be found
here,
it
must be found
over there.
The theory then explains both parts of this
proposition-why it
could not
happen here, and why it
must
happen
over there. Thus the hopes for the "true" revolution and the "true"
socialism are transposed from the factories of Europe to the rice
paddies of Asia or the jungles of South or Latin America. For Lenin
and Luxemburg the locale of these redemptive events could still be
called the colonies; today, of course, it is described as the Third
World.
The dialectic of prophecy, disappointment, and "logicalization"
is the inner drama of the Marxist imagination in this century. Its
psychic roots are profoundly religious, and that is why rationalist
interpreters of the times fail to understand why Marxism continues
to be plausible to so many people who, rationally speaking, should
know better. Prophecy is not falsifiable. (One may add that, if at all,
it is falsified not by its failures but by its successes: there are few
Marxists indeed in Marxist countries. Was it George Bernard Shaw
who said that the worst thing that can happen to you is that you get
